* * *
His eyes were looking up at her in the dim light, bitter gold above the gag of scarlet silk.
'Yes,' she said, 'you're here, in the garden of Shanga. I brought you here. We have a bargain to talk about, Fond.'
She undid the gag, keeping her hand close over him mouth lest he should cry out.
He said, 'There will be no bargain between us, Earthwoman.'
'Your life, Fond. Your life for mine, and Jim's and the others here who can still be saved. Destroy the prisms, stop this madness, and you can live to be as old and crazy as your mother.'
There was no fear in him. Unbending pride, and hatred, but no fear. He laughed.
She put her hand on his throat, her fingers reaching iron-strong around his neck. 'Slim,' she said. 'Soft, and tender. It would snap so easily.'
'Break it, then. Shanga will go on without me. Kyr Hal will take over. And you, Berit Winters—you can't escape.'His teeth showed white in a taunting smile. 'You'll run with the beasts. No woman can break free from Shanga.'
Winters nodded. 'I know that,' she said quietly. 'Therefore I must destroy Shanga before it destroys me.'
He looked at her, naked and unarmed, crouching in the brush. Once more, he laughed.
She shrugged. 'Perhaps it is impossible. I won't know that until it's too late, anyway. It isn't really me I'm worried about, Fond. I could be perfectly happy running on all fours through your garden. Probably I would be perfectly happy hissing and wallowing in the lake. Now the idea sickens me, but after a touch of Shanga it would be all right. No. It isn't me that matters, nor even Jim.'
'What, then?'
'Earth has its pride, too,' she told his gravely, 'It's a younger and cruder pride than yours. It can become pretty ruthless and obnoxious at times, I'll admit. But on the whole, Earth is a good planet, and his people are good people, and he's done more to advance the Solanr System than all the other worlds put together. As an Earthwoman, I don't like to see my world disgraced.'
She glanced up and around the amphitheater. 'I think,' she went on, 'that Earth and Mars can learn a lot from each other, if the fanatics on both sides will stop making trouble. You're the worst one I've ever heard of, Fond. You go even beyond fanaticism.'She looked at his speculatively. 'I think you're as mad right now as your mother.'
He did not flare up at that, which convinced her that he was not mad at all, only twisted by the way he lived and the things he had been taught.
He said, 'What do you plan to do about all this?'
'Wait. Until dawn, or perhaps later. Anyway, until you've had time to think. Then I shall give you a last chance. After that, I shall kill you.'
He was smiling when she replaced the gag, and his eyes did not waver.
The hours passed. Darkness into dawn, and then into full daylight. Winters sat unmoving, her head bowed over her knees. Fond's eyes were closed, and it seemed that he slept.
The garden woke to life with the sun, and all around the dense thicket Winters heard the padding footsteps and the growling of the beasts of Shanga. The things in the shallow lake cried out, and their musky taint soured the wind. Winters shivered like a woman with fever and her brooding eyes were haunted.
After a while Jim came. Animal-like he had found her, animal-like he came slipping without sound through the brush. He would have cried out at the sight of Fond, but she silenced him. He crouched beside her, watching her. He was afraid of her and yet he could not stay away. She stroked his shoulder. It was soft and strong and trembling under her hand. His gaze was doe-like, full of sadness and a bewildered yearning.
Winters' face became as bleak and pitiless as the barren stars that watch from outer space.
The time grew very short. Jim began to look upward toward the prisms. Winters sensed in his a growing nervousness.
She shook Fond. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and she knew what his answer would be before she asked the question.
'Well?'
He shook his head.
For the first time, Winters smiled. 'I have decided,' she said, 'not to kill you, after all.'
What she did after that was done quickly and efficiently, and there was no one to see but Jim and Fond. Jim did not understand; the heiress of the Queens of Valkis understood too well.
People began to drift into the amphitheater. Martians, coming to see a show, coming to learn contempt and loathing for the women of Earth. Winters watched them. She was still smiling.
Suddenly she turned to Jim. When she rose a few minutes later, scratched and panting, he was securely bound with strips torn from bonds of Fond. This time he would not bathe so helplessly in the fire of Shanga.
The Martians gathered. Kyr Hal came into the royal box, bringing the old man, who leaned on her arm.
The gong sounded.
V
Once again, Winters watched the gathering of the beasts of Shanga. Hidden in the thicket, beyond the reach of the rays, she saw the hairy bodies rush and jostle toward the central clearing. She saw the shining of their drugged eyes. She heard them moan and whimper, and all over the garden the mouthing whisper went—'Shanga! Shanga!'
Jim writhed and thrashed in the agony of his desire, his cries muffled by the wad of silk she had thrust into his mouth. Winters could not bear to look at him. She knew how he was suffering. She was suffering too.
She saw that Kyr Hal was leaning forward over the edge of the wall, searching the garden. She knew what the Martian was looking for.
The last notes of the gong rang out. A silence fell on the clearing. Hairy anthropoid, shambling brutes that ran on all fours, nameless creatures beyond the ape, crawling things with wet and shining scales—all silent, all waiting.
The prisms began to glow. The beautiful wicked fire of Shanga filled the air. Berit Winters set her hand between her teeth and bit until the blood ran.
It seemed to her that she could hear a faint thin screaming, rising out of the flowering shrubs by the lake. Low, tough-stemmed shrubs that lay under the full rays of the prisms.
Shanga! Shanga!
She had to go, into the clearing, into the fiery light. She could not stand it. She must feel again the burning touch on her flesh, the madness and the joy. She could not stay away.
In desperation she flung herself down beside Jim and clung to him, shuddering in torment.
She heard Kyr Hal's voice, calling her name.
She steadied herself and rose, stepping out into the full sight of the royal box. The Martians ranged on either side watched her with interest, turning their attention momentarily from the orgy of the beasts of Shanga.
Winters said, 'I'm here, Kyr Hal.'
The woman of Barrakesh looked at her and laughed. 'Why fight it, Winters? You can't keep away from Shanga.'
Winters asked, 'Where is your high priest? Has he wearied of the sport?'
Kyr Hal shrugged. 'Who knows the mind of the Sir Fond? He comes and goes as he will.'She leaned forward, 'Go on, Winters! The fire of Shanga is waiting. Look how she sweats there, trying to be a woman! Go on, apeling—join your brothers!'
The shrill jeering laughter of the Martians fell upon Winters with the sharpness of spears.
She stood there, naked in the sunlight, her head held stubbornly erect, and she did not move. She could not control the trembling of her limbs nor the harshness of her breathing. The sweat ran in her eyes and blinded her, and the fire of Shanga danced on the writhing bodies, and she thought she would go mad with torment, but she stood there and would not move. She thought she was going to die, but she would not move.
And the Martians watched.
Kyr Hal said, 'Tomorrow, then. Perhaps the next day—but you'll go, Earthwoman.'
Winters knew that she would. She could not go through this again. If she were still alive in the garden of Shanga the next time the gong sounded, she would go with her sisters.
The fire of Shanga died at last from the prisms, and the creatures of its making lay still on the ground. The Martians sighe
d. The first stir of departure ran through them. Berit Winters cried out, 'Wait!'
Her voice rang back from the empty upper tiers, and it brought every eye upon her. There was desperation in it, and triumph, and the anger of a woman driven beyond the bounds of reason.
'Wait, you women of Mars! You came to see a show. Very well, I'll give you one. You, Kyr Hal! You told me something, down there in Valkis. You told me of the women of Caer Dhu who first made Shanga, and how in one generation they were destroyed by it. One generation.'
She stepped forward, finding release for her tortured nerves in this denunciation.
'We of Earth are a young race. We're still close to our beginnings, and for that you hate and mock us, calling us apes. Very well. But that youth gives us strength. We go very slowly down the road of Shanga.
'But you of Mars are old. You have followed the circle of time a long way around, and the end is always close to the beginning. In one generation the women of Caer Dhu were gone. Our fibers are iron, but theirs were only straw.
'That's why no Martian will practice Shanga—why it was forbidden by the City-States. You don't dare to practice it, because it hurls you headlong down that road—toward your end or your beginning, who knows? But you haven't the strength to take it, and you're afraid.'
A jeering, angry howl rose from the crowd.
Kyr Hal shouted, 'Listen to the ape. Listen to the beast we drove through the streets of Valkis!'
'Yes, listen to her!' Winters cried. 'Because the Sir Fond is gone, and only the ape knows where he is!'
That silenced them, and in the quiet Winters laughed.
'Perhaps you don't believe me. Shall I tell you how I did it?'She told them, and when she was through telling she listened, while they called her liar, and she jeered in Kyr Hal's face.
'Wait,' she shouted. 'Wait, and I'll bring his to you.'
She turned and went toward the clearing. She went fast, because the beasts were already beginning to stir and rouse from their temporary stupor. She remembered from her own experience with Shanga that before consciousness returned there was a period of delirium, so that even in the Trade City solariums the people were not turned loose until it had passed.
Threading her way between the brutish bodies, leaping over them, avoiding the touch of the scaly things, she came to the clump of flowering shrubs by the lake and crawled in among them.
She had not known. She had guessed from Kyr Hal's statement that the metamorphosis was swift, but she had not known. There were some things that a woman could not even guess at.
In spite of herself, she cried out. She did not want to look at the thing that lay there, did not even want to know that such a form of life had existed, or could exist. But she had to look at it. She had to go close to it, so that she might undo the silken bonds that held it to the roots of the shrubs. She had to touch it. She had to lay her hands upon its softness, lift its flaccid weight, hold its slippery squirming against her own body.
It had eyes. That was the worst of it. It had eyes, and it looked at her.
She went away from the thicket, carrying her burden. Back across the clearing, where two great males were already fighting over a he, out into the open space before the royal box, where all could plainly see.
She lifted the thing over her head, high into the sunlight.
'Here!' she shouted. 'Don't you recognize him? Last of the royal house of Valkis—the Sir Fond!'
Around a portion of the wriggling anatomy that might once have been a neck, the collar of golden plaques swung, shining.
For a moment she held his so, while the faces of the Martians stared like the masks of dead women and Kyr Hal rose and gripped the edges of the stone. Then she laid her burden down and stepped back from it where it moved horribly across the turf.
'Look there, you Martians,' she said. 'That is your own beginning.'
In the utter, stricken silence the old man rose. He stood for a moment, looking down, and it seemed that he was about to speak or cry out, but no sound came. Then he fell, out over the wall and down the sheer drop into the arena. He did not move again.
As though he had led them, the Martians rose with one low terrible cry and followed him. Not to death, as they dropped over the wall, but to vengeance.
Winters ran. She had Jim free in a minute, dragging him away into denser cover. The mouth of the tunnel was not far distant.
The Martians swarmed in upon the clearing, and then the beasts of Shanga saw them. With roars and screams, they surged out to meet their attackers.
Knife and short sword and spiked brass knuckles against fang and claw and the powerful muscles of the brute. The scaly creatures darted here and there, hissing, slashing with their rows of needle-sharp reptilian teeth. Great hands ripped and tore, snapping bones like matchsticks, cracking skulls. And the slim blades flickered in the sunlight, bright tongues speaking death.
Vengeance was done that day in the garden of Shanga. The vengeance of Earth on Mars, and the vengeance of women upon the shame of their heritage.
Winters saw Kyr Hal run her sword through the creeping horror that had been Fond, through and through again until all motion stopped. Then she shouted Winters' name.
Winters went to her.
Neither spoke. There was nothing more to say. Bare-handed, Winters went against the Martian's sword. With the nightstallion carnage of the battle going on around them, they two were alone. They two had a special score to settle.
Winters took one long gash above the heart before she caught Kyr Hal's arm and broke it. The Martian never whimpered. With her left hand she reached for the knife at her girdle, but it never left the sheath. Winters laid Kyr Hal backward across her knee and placed one thigh across her loins and an elbow across her throat. After a moment she dropped the broken body and went away, taking the sword.
The guards came running into the arena through the tunnel.
The fight was spreading outward from the lake. Locked in struggling, swaying knots, the beasts of Shanga slew the Martians and were slain. The waters of the lake were stained red, and the corpse of a Martian was being dragged stealthily into it from the mud of the bank. There was something hidden below the surface, something that could no longer fight on land, but only lay quietly in wait, and fed.
Now the guards had come with their long spears, and Winters knew that in the end there would not be one creature left alive in the garden. And it was well.
She took Jim's hand and led his toward the tunnel, running in the shelter of the trees. The fight was occupying everyone's attention. The brute males were hard to kill, and they fought for the love of it. The tunnel was empty, the gate open, the guards inside the arena, hard at work. Winters and the boy fled through it, taking cover outside the amphitheater just before another group of guards came down from the palace.
From there, with infinite haste and caution, they made their way down the cliffs through the dead ruins of Valkis, and then out across the desert, skirting the living town by the canal. Kyr Hal's flier was on the field where Winters remembered it.
She thrust Jim inside, and as she followed his she saw the angry mob start to pour out of Valkis, where word of her crime and her escape had been brought, a little too late.
She took the flier up, setting a course for Kahora. And now that it was all over, she felt a great weariness and an overwhelming desire to forget the very name of Shanga.
But she knew that she could never forget. The golden fire had burned too deep. She knew that she would always be haunted by the beautiful face of Fond as it had looked when she shackled his in the clearing, and by the memory of the high thin screaming as the light poured down from the prisms. Even the psychos could never make her forget.
The governments of Earth and Mars would see to it now that Shanga was stamped out forever. She was glad, and a little proud, because it had been her doing. But even so . . .
She looked over at Jim. Someday, she prayed, he would be himself again. The taint of Shanga would pass
him, and he would once more be the Jim Leland she had given her heart to.
But will it pass entirely? For a moment it seemed that she heard the mocking voice of Fond, speaking in her soul. Will it pass from you, Berit Winters? Can one who has run with the beasts of Shanga ever be the same again?
She did not know. Looking back, she saw the smoke rising from the unholy garden—and she did not know.
THE END
Artwork by Mark Sebastian
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JEKKARA PRESS
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Coming Soon
The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn
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The Impossible Venusian – Tara Loughead
Slave Ship of Space – Tara Loughead
The Gender Switch Adventures
The Blue Behemoth – Lee Brackett
The Scarlet Citadel [Conyn the Barbarian] – Roberta E. Howard
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